Office Live and SharePoint

Hey all – Rob Mauceri here. I’m the group program manager for the Office SharePoint Designer team. I’ve worked on SharePoint Designer (and before that FrontPage) for the last 12 years as a developer and program manager. One of the coolest parts about working on SharePoint Designer is the amazing excitement customers have for SharePoint and the many places where SharePoint is being rolled out. One of my favorites is Microsoft Office Live which is built on SharePoint. Below is a brief introduction by John Christensen from the Microsoft Office Live team about their new partner community and how SharePoint Designer fits in:

Microsoft Office Live provides a great way to expand your business using SharePoint Designer. This set of Internet-based services are built on Windows SharePoint Services and are designed to help a small business develop a Web presence, attract new customers, and manage their organization more effectively. Office Live has also created a 3rd-party marketplace for Microsoft partners who are offering services and solutions built on the platform. This is a great way to get in touch with new customers for your WSS-based solutions, and it’s free!

A Microsoft Office Live solution can range from a simple template that a customer uploads as an .stp file using the built in Upload Wizard, to a light mashup that incorporates a third-party Web Service, to a composite application that exposes an existing client or hosted application to a Microsoft Office Live based WSS template using SOAP. You can also modify and redistribute one of the Business Applications that are included in a Microsoft Office Live Premium subscription – change field headings, add columns, incorporate some logic that you support, and make it more applicable for customers in a specific industry.

The Microsoft Office Live partner community is just ramping up, but there are already some very cool solutions out there like Solution Canvas in the UK who has developed a practice management system for small legal offices, and Qdabra in the US who offers Qdabra Project Tracker, an InfoPath based solution that streamlines creating estimates and statements of work for all types of consulting projects. The Microsoft Office Live team thinks there is great potential for the SharePoint Designer community to tap into the Microsoft Office Live customer base and add value to their subscriptions. They would love to see some you create solutions for Microsoft Office Live over the next 2 months and place them in the free Marketplace. If you are interested in this opportunity then check out the Microsoft Office Live Developer Portal to learn more about developing on Microsoft Office Live, and visit the Microsoft Office Live Partner page to learn more about the opportunity and the requirements for the marketplace. You can also sign up for a free 30 day trial of Microsoft Office Live Premium to try it for yourself. If you still have questions or want to provide feedback, then please send us an e-mail.

SharePoint Designer doesn’t use Trident. SharePoint Designer, Expression Web, and the next version of Visual Studio’s Visual Web Designer (code name Orcas) all use the same stanards-based web design component. This component was developed jointly by the three product teams for high fidelity rendering of web standards like CSS, XHTML, as well as ASP.net. This topic was blogged about by Scott Gutherie of the Visual Studio team a few months back: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/08/my-first-look-at-orcas-presentation.aspx

We have a very large setup of SharePoint 2003 Site Collections (3000+), which we are about to migrate to 2007 in fw weeks. Needless to say it has been a challenging joyride so far!

We are now facing a decision-point, where-by we want to leverage SharePoint Designer and yet stop users from having certain "Design" functionality in the client. As a policy we do not allow UI changes, but only functional ones.

Now the question is, how do we achieve that?

For now we have blocked ALL access as a result, since there is no obvious way of granular control.

How about using RPC and blocking certain functions? As is listed for Office Live, the RPC methods that have been restricted. Has anyone done it similarly? Any support issues we may face?

I am a newbie so please don’t flame me. I’m having difficulty formulating the question but here goes. I understand the webspaces in office live (essentials) are not considered as HTTPS protocol but they are private.

Lets say I have a list in one of the spaces (shared) approx. 12 columns with each field approx. 15 characters, how many rows of data would the list accomodate? I am thinking it would depend upon my storage space avaliable (even if this is possible)????

I am using office Enterprise 2007 and desire to try and link the sharepoint list with access.

It may be possible that 200 or so individual simeltaneous connections (maybe more) attempt to surf to the list and hopefully could do a query (could they)? And what kind of response time could I expect (if any)?

The search would be simple, as it would search a "description" field which would be approximately 60-80 chars long.

Whenever I am trying to copy past the contacts from My Excel sheet to the contact manager of Microsoft Office Live, using the method of edit spreadsheet then getting the sharepoing error and active X error can you explain the reason for this.